The legal department of a large property casualty company frequently receives specialized services from outside legal counsel. These firms however were becoming increasingly frustrated due to delinquent payments, which at times were in excess of 150 days past due. The target measurement was dramatically flawed due in part to outliers on both ends of the spectrum - as quick as a one-day turn around or as long as 60 days. Both were operational problems, but were canceling each other out and leaving a deceivingly acceptable average turnaround time.

In addition to upset vendors, the company was faced with other operational challenges. They lacked a reliable method of tracking invoices and were unable to isolate the cause of billing inefficiencies within the department. The Iago Group was engaged to address the situation, identify root cause, measure inconsistencies, and implement the necessary changes to the existing process.

Iago Program Decreases Information System Related Incidents by 91%; Decreases Mean Time To Recovery by 57%Incident Management Initiative Results in Shorter Time to System Recovery, Decreased Cost to the Client, and Increased Customer Satisfaction

The Challenge

The volume of Information System related incidents was too high and the time to restore service when there was an incident was too long. This meant that a piece of company technology went down – from something as simple as Microsoft Office to something much more complex and dramatic, like the systems that local pharmacists use to fulfill customer orders.

What further contributed to the problem was the fact that there were limitations with the data available. There were multiple sources of incident data, incidents that were not tracked at all as well as inconsistent mean time to recovery (MTTR) measurement. Therefore, it was challenging to assess past incidents and downtime. Furthermore, there was no formal processes in place to address incidents as they arose.